Florbela Espanca (1894-1930) is one of Portugal’s most known and loved poets. I became interested in Florbela’s poetry after hearing her poem “Amar” sung by the Fado singer Cidália in Lisbon in 1979. I was captured by the ineffable quality of the poem and have been translating her poetry ever since. Florbela’s poetry speaks to me because of the absence and longing it expresses, along with her use of striking imagery from nature, religion, and Symbolism.

Her life was filled with torment caused by her gender, her deviation from provincial mores, and her lifelong sense of loss and abandonment. She was the illegitimate child of a housemaid and a nondescript father who didn’t acknowledge her until nearly twenty years after her death. In a Catholic country at the turn of the Twentieth century, she married three times and divorced twice.

She is reputed to have been in love with her only brother, also illegitimate, who killed himself by plunging into the Tagus River in a solo flight. On her 36th birthday, Florbela died, presumably of an illness, but leaving in question the real cause, since she had attempted suicide twice in the immediate months before her death.

She was little understood by contemporary critics, who characterized her style as “feminine” and “narcissistic,” usually conflating the two terms. However, she was well ahead of her time as a voice calling for freedom of gender and mind. She uses liturgical imagery, was influenced by French Symbolism, and frequently describes her beloved Alentejo.

While much of her poetry is characterized by longing and a sense of abject abandonment, it is nearly always beautiful. Her main oeuvre consists of four volumes of sonnets: Livro de Mágoas, Livro de Soror Saudade, Charneca em Flor, and Reliquiae. The following are my translations of a selection of original poems published in 1994, in Rui Guedes, Obras Completas de Florbela Espanca, Dom Quixote: Lisboa.

To Love

I want to love, love with abandon!
To love for love’s sake: here, there,
this one, that one, another, and everyone.
To make love, to be in love, and to love no one.

To remember? To Forget? Makes no difference.
To hold on or let go? Neither bad nor good.
But to say you can love one your entire life,
is a lie.

There is one Spring in each life:
You must sing it like Spring, floridly,
For if God gave us voice, it was to sing!

And if one day I must be dust, ashes, and nothing
let my night be a dawn,
let me know how to lose myself . . . to find myself . . .

(*)Billie Maciunas graduated from Brown University with a degree in comparative literature and went on to receive a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, continuing her study of literature in the Portuguese language and writing a master’s thesis on Florbela’s poetry. She has taught American Literature and is also a poet. She lives in Altamonte Springs, Florida, with her Australian terrier Ruffian.